What Is Facial Recognition

Facial recognition systems are bio-metric technologies capable of identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. Facial recognition can identify a person by analyzing patterns based on the person’s facial textures and shape.

Facial
recognition is said to be started in the 60s when Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe,
one of the founders of artificial intelligence, manually classified faces by
hand using a device (RAND tablet) to input horizontal and vertical
coordinates. The metrics then were
placed in a database and when a new photograph was given to the system it could
retrieve the image from the database matching the individual. Nowadays facial
recognition solutions have already become a part of our everyday routine. This
technology is used both for personal security (e.g,. in mobile devices or ATM
machines) and national security (e.g., in the airports, music fests and many other purposes).

How does it all work? Facial recognition software isolates a face from the rest of the
background in the image or video. The software first recognizes the face, then
measures different facial features. It recognizes these features as nodal
points. A human face consists of 80 nodal points. Historically facial
recognition software relied on a 2D image to identify or verify another 2D
image from the database. However, today algorithms
are much more powerful and uses a 3D model, which is more reliable.

What is the future of facial biometrics? The US government market
— which includes
federal, state and
local law enforcement — is expected to
soar from $136.9 million in 2018 to $375 million by 2025, according to an
estimate by market research firm Grand View Research. If we take the global
market, the figures are even more impressive – Facial Recognition Market
Report, published by Allied Market Research, forecasts that the global market is expected to garner $9.6 billion by 2022,
registering a CAGR of 21.3% during the period 2016-2022.

REAL CASES

Facial recognition technology has already played a significant role in solving
and preventing crime. Let’s look at some cases.

Generally, in the US facial recognition is already in heavy use. The
Georgetown report stated facial recognition has helped the NYPD crack about 2,900 cases in more
than five years of using the technology. The New
York Police Department has
become increasingly vocal regarding the appropriate use of this
technology. Trained facial examiners review hundreds of candidate photos when
attempting to identify an individual, corroborating video or photo evidence
with other photos of the potential suspect sourced from
previous arrests, social media
posts, or other
databases available to the investigators.

In Europe facial biometrics use is more rigorously controlled. However in
2016, the “man in the hat” responsible for the Brussels terror
attacks was
identified thanks to FBI facial recognition software.

Moreover, the South Wales Police implemented it at the UEFA Champions League Final in 2017. Facial recognition will be a major topic for the 2020 Olympic
Games in Tokyo, Japan.

Facial recognition technology and an information-sharing program have also proved
instrumental in helping police in China to identify and track missing children. This powerful technology has
already proven to be effective all over the globe.

FACIAL
RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY IN OXYGEN FORENSIC® SOFTWARE

In July 2019 Oxygen Forensic®’s JetEngine module, built into Oxygen
Forensic Detective offered the innovative ability for investigators to
categorize human faces using built in facial recognition technology. The facial
recognition component is available in the Faces section to all users at no
additional charge. The unique features include:

Industry leading accuracy (as measured by
NIST)

Detailed face analytics (gender, race,
emotion, and more)

Immediate categorization and matching (5
faces/second)

Support for massive volumes of data

Using the built-in facial recognition technology investigators will spend
less time looking through thousands of photos or videos in a single mobile,
cloud or drone extraction and now better equipped to analyze the aggregated
visual data from hundreds of devices!

Here are some possible use cases:

Identification of known individuals from
images captured from mobile devices and cloud services in investigative
cases. Clustering or grouping all faces
in similarity “buckets” for easy identification of all images/videos with the
subject(s).

Assistance in locating endangered
children, human trafficking, or other crimes by searching across all the
images/videos in cases within Oxygen Forensic® JetEngine showing grouping of
known images uploaded and those with high confidence levels of being the same
person(s).

Drones capture images and videos. This data can be extracted and analyzed which
can assist in theater to identify possible known terrorists.